The Sound of GIFs

What to make of GIFbites isn’t quite clear, not yet. It’s billed itself as a weekly podcast, each episode no longer than 15 seconds, and its name makes its visual orientation evident, even if the association between image and sound is less so.

There are images; a different one accompanies each of the podcast’s two initial episodes. The audio to the first podcast is a description of the image itself: — “emerging from a Golden Girl like a cut-and-paste ghost perambulates a long-haired white wolf bear …”

The second is non-verbal, a mumble of an industrial rhythm that seems to mirror the dentil pattern of the track’s image.

5 Comments

The project highlights one of the awkwardnesses of multiple media ideas involving GIFs. Soundcloud makes the sound easily playable, with an accompanying animation showing a cursor moving through the file. But Soundcloud, like Facebook, disables GIFs from moving (right?), so Rourke has to post a link to the GIF, which loads in a separate page or tab. The ideal platform for a project like this would allow the GIF animation and an embedded audio player on the same page (as you had last year). No biggie, I just get annoyed when I see frozen GIFs.

At first I wondered whether to post the GIFs at all, but instinct told me that missing them out of the format would be crazy. I have just setup a tumblr for the podcast/project. I think the format works way better this way.

It works better on Tumblr. Was happy to hear Gretta Louw’s voice pronouncing GIF with a hard G. I’m told that after the Oxford English Dictionary made GIF its “word of the year” it got the whole concept wrong by pronouncing it JIFF and only using it as a verb (as in “the teenagers jiffed Bieber throwing up onstage”).

The reminds me of something. The first time I heard the word “GIF” — not saw it, but heard it, out loud — was in the early 1990s. I’m not sure when exactly, somewhere between 1990 and 1994, I’d say. A graphic designer on staff at a magazine where I worked would, after hours, trade images online after reworking them in PhotoShop. (Let your imagination run wild with that one and you’ll likely still fall short of the reality of the situation.) Anyhow, the designer referred to these images by their format, but given the context, for quite awhile I thought he was saying “gifts.”

I think when you see the word “GIF” its closeness to gift makes you pronounce it that way. Which is why the street, in its wisdom, has it right and Wikipedia- and OED-readers (and the GIF’s original creator) have it wrong. Your story reminds me of a trip I made to Radio Shack in the early ’90s. The salesman, a pure geek, told me he was going on the internet and uploading “some images” (said with a significant look). The mental picture I had was of incredibly primitive dot matrix or ASCII porn and I felt kind of sorry for the guy.

5 Most Recent Posts

Current Activities

• February 6, 2019: First day of the new semester of the 15-week "Sounds of Brands" course I teach once a year at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.
• March 22, 2019: I'm giving a talk at the Algorithmic Art Assembly, two days of events in San Francisco: aaassembly.org.
• December 13, 2019: This day marks the 23rd anniversary of Disquiet.com.
• January 7, 2020: This day marks the 8th anniversary of the Disquiet Junto.
• Ongoing: The Disquiet Junto series of weekly communal music projects explore constraints as a springboard for creativity and productivity. There is a new project each Thursday afternoon (California time), and it is due the following Monday at 11:59pm: disquiet.com/junto.
• My book on Aphex Twin's landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, published as part of the 33 1/3 series, an imprint of Bloomsbury, is now in its second printing. It has been translated into Spanish, and is due out soon in Japanese, as well. It can be purchased at amazon.com, among other places.

disquiet junto

The Disquiet Junto is an ongoing weekly collaborative music-making space in which restraints are used as a springboard for creativity. Subscribe to the announcement list at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto. There is an FAQ. ... These are the 5 most recent weekly projects: